Most other 3d modeling programs, like Blender for example, have a pretty amazing solution for creating characters that can be rigged and posed in the model. I’ve seen some hacks that use Sketchup’s groups and layers to sort of do this, but it’s a pretty difficult, non-intuitive solution with some serious limitations.
In more than a decade of this program’s existence, why hasn’t this been added?
I’d love to be able to design everything in SketchUp, as programs like Blender are just ugly to me. But, without this feature, I can’t.
You may have seen these sort of faceless characters (no facial features) hanging about this forum as avatars and as scale markers in SU templates. They’re really just 2D images painted on a face and set to face the camera continuously. These 2D cartoon figures serve in most situations in SU where people are needed to inhabit a scene. You will be hard pressed to create ergonomically correct 3D human figures.
Yes, I get that. But, I’m not talking about fluid animation. I’d just like to be able to create characters that can be easily posed differently in multiple scenes of the same model, and then exported as 2D images. I think that would be a very helpful feature.
I wasn’t talking about animation at all. I’d like to be able to easily rig a character so that it can easily be posed differently in different 2D export shots of a scene. I’ve looked at SketchyPhysics. Doesn’t help me, I’m afraid.
Thanks so much for your response. Yeah, I can already do that sort of choppy joint action natively in Sketchup with properly placed pivot points, layers, and groups.
I just did take a look at Poser, as you recommended. Watched their intro video. I’m going to have to look closer at that. It seems like it might be a solution. Though, I wonder how well the finished model would import into Sketchup.
I was messing around with Blender a bit more tonight. Man, does that program have a steep learning curve. Crazy. But, I was able to pose and export a character into Sketchup as a Collada file. It’s not perfect, and it would have to be pre-posed in Blender. But, that actually might work.
Anyway, thanks so much to everyone for all the responses. I sincerely appreciate it.
Have you found a solution yet? If not I’d suggest getting Daz studio as it’s free and has a lot of free content, I use it for the exact reason you need it, I have a few tips on a workflow you may find interesting. With new plugins like transmutr and Skimp posing characters in Daz and importing them into SU with reduced geometry has become fast and easy.
Character rigging tools are more appropriate for one of the big DCC (Digital Content Creation) category tools, like 3DMax, Maya, Lightwave or Cinema4D. Or Blender, which has the added advantage of being free of cost.
We aren’t likely to add these tools to the core SketchUp modeler, which is more focused on the design of buildings and other things of interest to architects.
